


Such Sweet Sorrow

by Meduseld



Category: Ocean's (Movies)
Genre: Backstory, Bisexuality, Character Study, Con Artists, F/F, Falling In Love, How Debbie got here, Prison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-17
Updated: 2018-06-17
Packaged: 2019-05-24 09:51:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14952389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meduseld/pseuds/Meduseld
Summary: Debbie says goodbye. Debbie says hello.





	Such Sweet Sorrow

Her mother leaves when she’s all of eight years old, taking loose jewels her father got from somewhere no one wants to think too hard about and the real Rembrandt they’ve got hidden in the pantry. Debbie wails in the doorway full of wounded pride, shock and real, real anger. Daddy’s on a job somewhere, something will rails she thinks, from the blueprints she managed to sneak a look at. So it’s Danny that has to wrap a tan, boy smelling arm around her and pull her back inside. “I don’t know what I’m going to do!” she wails because she heard a woman say it on TV and she was glamorous and beautiful and probably didn’t spend half her time on the lookout for cops, just in case. “I’ll teach you” he says, strong and sure and sounding a lot older than he is.

He makes good on that promise, showing her how to pick a pocket and how to hot wire a car and how to spot a mark. He doesn’t keep her from anything or anyone. There’s a lot of bullshit in the world of conning, but Danny makes it so that she always has a seat at the table and a voice in the choir no matter what is or what isn’t between her legs. He also gets her arrested when she’s fifteen and he’s eighteen, smiling when she flips him off, contorted in cuffs, so she’ll learn the lesson the hard way. It gets cleaned from her record, at least, but you never forget your first.

The first time Debbie hears the name John Frazier is one of the last times she sees Daddy. For a long time she only knows him as “that limey fuck”, but she sneaks into the courthouse looking to all the word like a harried stenographer. Frazier testifies, and smiles with his eyes when he sees her. That’s the moment when she knows it’s all over. The thing about the good guys is, when they’re good? They’re _really_ good. The sentence ends up being more years than her Daddy has left, anybody can see that. He doesn’t want them coming to see him, ever, and they expected that. So she and Danny have to say goodbye in the cramped courthouse bathroom before the bailiff notices. He walks away from them in a way Debbie’s seen him do a thousand times. And it hurts somehow, after all this time, because she knows she’ll never see it again.

In the beat up Bronco they lifted from some SuperMart Danny reaches over and takes her hand. They promise each other to never die like that, defeated and forgotten like a houseplant no one can remember to water.

Tammy is loud. She’s got red hair as fake and plastic as her nails, leopard print and a Southern accent. She tells Debbie, within fifteen minutes of meeting her, without a hint of shame, that she got her start in the legal side of things, hooking in Nevada. Three hours after that they hit a truck in Jersey and Tammy never wavers once. They celebrate with milkshakes and table dancing. For a while they have a good thing going, and she might be Debbie’s first friend. When she tells Debbie that what she really wants to do is get into fencing, instead, the first feeling is a gut stab of betrayal and a memory of being eight years old. But the friends part takes over and she’s happy for Tammy because it’s a great fit. The woman can haggle like a demon. Better, actually. She’s her first client and when Tammy smiles at her, Debbie likes her life just fine.

Three weeks later she gets the call that Danny’s been arrested and he’s not getting out of it. She dusts of her stenographer disguise and bypasses the courtroom. She goes to lock up, personal effects, box 37-F, labeled OCEAN, DANIEL J. She takes his watch, to remember him by. It’ll be years but when he gets out, he’s gonna know. It’ll make him smile, she’s mostly sure.

The day she meets Lou they’re in a crowded nightclub trying to steal each other’s rings. When they catch each other, eyes wide in the pulsing lights, Lou laughs. They go somewhere around the corner, to get food that comes to them fast and greasy. For the first time she thinks she understands what Danny saw in Rusty. A true partner in crime. One quirked eyebrow, cleared throat and titled chin later they’re running in the dark with the entire contents of the register at their disposal. They celebrate with tequila on the beach. They don’t fuck. They become soulmates instead.

Debbie’s never met someone like her before, no matter how long she’s been running in the same thieving, dirty circles. Lou understands her without any effort, like her brain has handles labeled ‘Eating’ ‘Sleeping’ ‘Breathing’ and ‘Debbie Ocean’. They share clothes and makeup and men and booze and sometimes crawl into each other’s beds at night, curled together like kittens. But never more than that. Lou comes from the same wet black earth as Debbie, but worse. Her family dealt more in the meth and kneecapping side of the trade she tells Debbie one night, which is why she left Australia, she doesn’t say. _I can never kiss her_ , she thinks, looking down at Lou’s head, pillowed in her lap.

She meets Claude, which is a total fuck up from top to bottom. The thing of it is, he tries to con her. And that’s _interesting_. Hasn’t happened in years. He’s not one of the good old boys, the names on her roster, or Danny’s crew. The thing of it is, when the itchy prison uniform is on and the doors have slammed shut she can’t figure out _why._ Not the when it comes to the con, that’s her first language. It’s herself, chasing a life that she never wanted, letting Claude lead, settling into a _routine_ , a con with no art to it, no ambition, a life like trying to breathe through a dress that doesn’t fit. What did she want?

She chews on it for three months, she throws herself into it, and honestly, the only the thing she really figures out is that what hurts most is that somewhere along the way she misplaced herself. The next deepest cut is that it was the first time she said goodbye to Lou. And the second, because she’s stuck behind steel and glass and Lou can’t come, not ever, because then she’ll be listed as “known associates”. All she has is a phone number that lists hers as JAILBIRD, a contact that leads to a contact that leads to a steady trade to keep her in business while she’s incarcerated and the feeling that maybe, she should have kissed her after all.

Debbie makes herself take a deep breath. It’s the past, and just like she can’t unarrest herself, or Danny or even Daddy, just like she can’t drag her mother back inside or hang that Rembrandt back on the wall or slide her fingers into Lou’s. She lets it go. Then she punches Dayana directly in the face and gets dragged to solitary to a soundtrack of cat calls, cheers and insults. That’s when she starts to work on The Con, the Job, the Debbie Ocean is a Picasso of Lies Gig. The name needs tweaking but she’s got time enough for that. And plenty to spare.

Danny slouches in toward the end of her sentence and she knows. There’s shadows under his eyes and his skin feels like paper. “Hey kid” he says and that’s all there is to it. She knows lies, cons and conmen like she knows German and knows how to spot a fake Van Gogh. “Out there” is what she says. “You promise me”. He nods. Danny will have fresh air and sunshine and a goodbye press of his hand to his sister’s behind glass. What he should have had was an opportunity to steal his watch back and laugh at her for being taken in like a mark on a Sunday. But that’s life, and Debbie knows it. She can’t go to the funeral, which she finds when the stamp on the papers for compassionate leave says DENIED. Debbie nods at the warden and slips an extra bit of stationery out of his office. She names every part of her con for the ones she learned by Danny’s side and smiles. There’s still this, at least.

She sees Danny first, Lou second. Reuben doesn’t count and Lou counts double anyway, smiling at her like Debbie brought her another set of Tiffany keys instead of a whole lot of trouble. The clothes in her closet, in the space she still has carved out by her side, smell like Lou. That night, after pressing a shiv against Claude and getting Chinese takeout to take back, she pulls on sweatpants and slips into Lou’s bed. In the dark she can feel her smile. “I missed you” she whispers, ducking her nose against the back of her neck. “I can tell” Lou says back, closing her hand around Debbie’s. It’s the first time she feels like she’s really out, like she’s come back home.

Then there’s the job and Tammy’s new life and hair but same smile and the crew. As a mark, Daphne is more fun than she expected and it’s easy, easy, easy. Until Lou is furious at her on the beach, but scared too, underneath, and Debbie tells her everything. She realizes that she’d give her beating heart on a platter to the girl that told her that she wanted to be David Bowie as a kid, and a grifter if that didn’t work out. Debbie offers the next best thing: the real con inside the con. Lou’s eyes go wide then narrow with a smile. “You cheeky _bitch_ ” she says and something in Debbie’s chest settles at last.

When they slice up the score there’s a moment when they stand together, breathing in sync. Lou’s in her biker gear, bike gassed up outside. She’s going to go coast to coast and back again. And in the doorway, she takes Debbie’s hand. “Come with me?” with the shyest smile Debbie’s ever seen on her outside of a job. Debbie kisses her instead, lingering and soft. “We should have done that years ago” she says, and means it. They kiss again and again and again, like a heartbeat. Finally, Debbie’s the one to pull away, always is. “I gotta do something first”, she says, and runs her thumb down to Lou’s lips, like a promise. Then she slips her hand into the pocket that has a shaker full of gin and walks back to the earthly remains of the only blood she had left.

Lou’s on the beach, bare feet in the sand, looking into the distance. She looks like a model, and she looks like the woman Debbie’s loved for half her life. “Hey stranger” she says when she sees Debbie and just like that they’re kissing like lovers, already.

“Hey” Debbie says, ready for the rest of her life.

**Author's Note:**

> I left the theater, had the thought "I should write fic" and this popped into my head along with the chorus to The Beatles' _[Hello, Goodbye](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rblYSKz_VnI)_ which gave me the summary. The title is from Shakespeare's _[Romeo& Juliet](http://nfs.sparknotes.com/romeojuliet/page_92.html)_ , natch. Finally, when I went to write about Tammy, my mind instantly jumped to this [this Cracked article](http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1250-5-myths-about-prostitutes-i-believed-until-i-was-one.html), so that's where that comes from. I'd also like to add that in this fic Frazier is played by Patrick Stewart. Because lbr, Corden is way too young for a dude that has tangled with all those Oceans for so long, and the role needed more gravitas anyway.


End file.
